A not really explosive plagiarism scandal has not rocked the extremely specialized world of naming contests for publicly owned snowplows as the Massachusetts State Department of Transportation has announced that one of the winners of this year’s contest: “Control-Salt-Delete,” submitted from a kindergarten class in New Salem, was stolen from “CTRL-Salt-Delete” the name of one of the winning entries of Chicago’s second annual snow plow naming contest, announced in January 2024.
Wait, whoever made that Chicago submission stole it from the Michigan State Department of Transportation who have had one such plow on the roads since at least early 2022.
It’s unlikely however that Chicago’s top winner from the 2023, which objectively is the greatest of all time, “Mrs O’Leary’s Plow,” was stolen from elsewhere, knowingly or otherwise. It’s too localized.